“Mailbird is making email a platform, not just an application.” – Techcrunch

38 days. That’s how much time the average person spends in their inbox every year.

That’s about 10% of your life spent writing, reading, and organizing email.

Yikes.

But there’s good news. Mailbird users, both free and Pro, save about 10% of the time they usually spend in their inbox (we measured it). That means you get an extra 91.2 hours every year to have fun and create great memories instead of clicking around your inbox.

And that number is before we release our Wingman Pro feature in a couple of months, along with tons of other productivity boosters in the pipeline.

“Mailbird is definitely worth keeping an eye on — it’s fast, functional, and could get some useful additional features down the line, both from the developers and its third-party app store.” – The Verge

The Perks of the Free Version

Lightning Speeds

You don’t even have to use your mouse. Every step from opening your email to searching to composing to sending to changing your apps to everything else…it’s all got a shortcut. And the Gmail shortcuts work in Mailbird, so no need to memorize new ones.

The Quick Compose shortcut lets you write and send an email without ever having to open Mailbird. Just hit your customizable shortcut (default is ctrl-alt-space), no matter what’s open on your screen, and type out your message in the box that pops up. The Quick Reply shortcut lets you reply in the same window as the email you’re reading (everything else has to open a new window), so you can save a few seconds every time you reply.

Not a shortcut user? Inline Action Bar shows a menu beside a person’s picture that lets you archive, move to inbox, reply, forward, mark as important, star, mark as read, spam, or delete that email…all within 2 inches of your mouse. No need to check a box & navigate to the top of your screen. Organization is easy too; just click the little ‘Label’ button right above each email and choose how you want to sort this email.

And it’s not just the front end that increases productivity. The back end is optimized to save every millisecond possible. Mailbird is always open and updating, but stays in the background and off your taskbar when you’re not using it. No waiting for it to load and update whenever you want to see your emails, just click it’s menu icon and it’s all in front of you. This also means you can always access your emails even when you’re offline.

The search is lightning fast. You’ll usually have all the emails that have to do with your search in less than a second (you can start reading the emails even before it’s done finding all of them). Even searching “the” only took 8 seconds to bring up every relevant email from the last 6 years.

It organizes all the searched emails into a scrollable list, no need to go to the next page every 20 emails. Want to find all the emails you’ve ever exchanged with a person? Just click on their picture and you’ve got them.

Mailbird also saves your last search, so you can navigate around and then quickly come back to it.

You can also you can search attachments by filename & size. You can see how useful this is when you need to find an important document or image or that video about your friends cat.

Sleek Design

The free version of Mailbird is packaged in a sleek, uncluttered, and modern design that keeps Mailbird looking sexy and staying intuitively easy to use.

The Mailbird Team managed to pack tons of features and apps into Mailbird while keeping it looking wonderfully simple and minimalistic.

Versatility

The open-sourced app store is packed with apps that let you mange your whole cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, CloudMagic), organize your life (Google calendar, Asana, and all your contacts), read your favorite blogs (Lifehacker, Techcrunch, Dailysocial and more to come), and get social (Facebook).

Can’t find the app you’re looking for? Then you can hop over to GitHub and create it yourself (and get paid for how many people use it!).

We know how important your privacy is. So, with Mailbird, your emails are for your eyes only. We ensure your privacy by never scanning the content of your emails.

Ever Evolving

The Mailbird team is improving and updating Mailbird daily. And you’re a part of that! The feedback app lets you send suggestions & ideas to the team, and vote on the best ones so that the team implements them first. You get to help build Mailbird into the email app that you

Social

Mailbird connects with Facebook, so you can see your friend’s profile pictures next to their emails. You’ll know who you’re chatting with at a glance, and get to see your friends’ smiles whenever you email them.

And the contacts app lets you click over to your contacts Facebook profiles, so you can see what they’re up to and chat on Facebook.

Why Mailbird Pro is Better

Mailbord pro comes with all the awesomeness of Mailbird free. The life-improving apps, productivity enhancing features, sleek and uncluttered interface. And you get to turn off ads and the “Sent from Mailbird” signature.

It’s Even Faster!

Mailbird Pro comes with the Wingman feature (in development) which tracks how long it takes you to compose your emails and how long it usually takes you to respond to an email. You can set goals for these speeds and have Wingman report it all back to you, analyze it, and give you personalized advice based on how you manage email so that you can improve your methods & save yourself even more time.

Wingman also organizes your emails by importance: Important (things sent by friends & by people you mark as “important”), Normal, and Newsletters. This means that your most important emails are always sitting right at the top of your inbox; no searching required.

Wingman let’s you “hit snooze” on an email, removing it from your inbox and bringing it back later, you choose when. This way, you can get emails to come back when you need them and hit inbox zero that much faster.

Finally, Wingman helps you keep your friendships thriving by organizing your contacts based on importance (how often you email them), letting you assign importance to your contacts, and reminding you if you haven’t spoken with someone important for a while.

It’s Got More Versatility!

Mailbird Pro users get access to the Pro Only Apps section of the app store (in development), packed with high quality apps to boost productivity and help you organize your whole life from Mailbird.

In addition to multi-identities, Mailbird Pro users also get multi-account (in development) which lets you manage all of your inboxes from the single Mailbird app.

What do you think?

Mailbird Free will save you hundreds of hours in your inbox. Mailbird Pro will save you thousands.

If Mailbird saves you thousands of hours of your lifetime, is that worth the price of three Starbucks coffees (aka US$12) a year?

I say hells-to-the-yea!

If you think so too, go ahead and grab that Pro account. Because, up until the end of Mailbird Open Beta and the launch the complete Mailbird to the world, Pro accounts are going for 25% off for life. That’s $9/year for an app that will save you thousands of hours over your lifetime.